In a major win for privacy rights, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Friday that police must obtain a search warrant in order to get access to cellphone location information.
Chief Justice Roberts wrote the 5-to-4 decision, joining the court's four liberals. The majority declared that the Fourth Amendment guarantees an expectation of privacy and that allowing police to obtain moment-by-moment tracking of an individual's cellphone location is a kind of surveillance that the framers of the Constitution did not want to occur without a search warrant.
The chief justice said that this sort of tracking information is akin to wearing an electronic ankle-bracelet monitoring device and that the citizens of the country are protected from that kind of monitoring unless police can show a judge that there is probable cause of a crime that justify it.
He stressed, however, that this is a narrowly focused opinion that leaves in tact other precedents when it comes to dealing with financial information, banking and office records.
Roberts' noted that the decision also allows for warrantless cell-tower location information searches in emergencies and for national-security purposes.
The four dissenters were led by Justice Anthony Kennedy, who was joined by the court's three most conservative members, justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch. In a rare move, they each filed separate dissents.
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